Automatic bbPress Forum Posting – Fill bbPress With Content

Why autoposting to bbPress?

A forum can be an invaluable addition to any blog or website. It allows your visitors to easily contribute to your website or ask questions, making it more likely they will come back. In the process they provide you with valuable user generated content for free.

The only problem: Adding a new forum to a website is hard for a simple reason: At the start the forum is completely empty!

This is exactly where CMS Commander comes in: With our bbPress filler feature you can automatically create relevant bbPress topics related to the niche of your weblog. The generated topics include replies and can be posted by random user accounts, making them look completely natural and allowing your visitors to join in to the discussions.

What do I need to do to activate posting content to bbPress forums?

There are no extra steps necessary to make it possible to fill your new bbPress forum with content through CMS Commander automatically. The steps are the same as when posting content to your WordPress weblogs as “posts” or “pages”. Since bbPress is part of WordPress and integrated as a plugin the only difference is that CMS Commander will post to your forums with a different post type: “topics”.

Before starting to fill your forum with new topics you need to go to the “Choose Sources” page in your CMS Commander account and activate the content sources you want to use in your bbPress forum. For forums we do especially recommend Yahoo Answers, Flickr and Youtube content since these sources include comments which get posted as replies to your automatic topics in bbPress! For more details on this please read our “Activating Content Sources and Setting Up Their Options” article.

The only other thing you do of course need is a bbPress forum on your WordPress weblog. That means the bbPress plugin needs to be activated and you need to create at least one forum to display the content inside.

How does bbPress autoposting work in CMS Commander?

Like normal autoposting the “Bulk Content” page is where you need to go in order to fill your bbPress forum with relevant topic. Please refer to our article about “Using the Bulk Content Page” for general instructions on how to use this page to fetch content from any of the 20+ sources supported by CMS Commander.

Recommended but optional: Use the “Assign Random Users” button to assign a separate author to each topic and reply that will get posted to your forums. This makes the results look much more natural. It requires that you bulk created user accounts with CMS Commander first!

In the “Post Type” field enter “topic” without quotes.

In the “Parent” field you need to enter your forum ID. You can find the correct ID by going to “Forums” page in your blog’s WP-admin. Hover over the name of your created forum (or create one first!) and check the URL value of the link. You should see “&post=XXXX” as part of it, marking the ID you need to use.

In the “Add Comments” field check “Yes, as bbPress replies”. Please note that replies only get posted for content sources that support them, which are Yahoo Answers, Youtube, Amazon and Flickr.

Check the site or sites you want to automatically post the forum topics to in the “Your Sites” list and then press the “Post to Selected Sites” button.

After that all the items from your “Bulk Content” page will get posted to your bbPress forum automatically, with each comment added as a unique reply. Have a look at the image below where the important fields you need to change for filling a bbPress forum discussed above are marked in red:

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